A group of Mark Zuckerberg-funded researchers is testing implantable brain devices as part of a $5 billion quest to end disease

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife,
Priscilla Chan, have sold 29 million Facebook shares to raise $5
billion for an ambitious biomedical-research program called the
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).

Funded in part by the CZI is the
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which employs top-notch scientists
from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco.

Researchers including a Biohub investigator are studying a
wireless
implantable brain device, called the "Wand" for short, in
primates.

Published on New Year's Eve, their first study details how
the Wand records, stimulates, and disrupts movement in real time.

Mark Zuckerberg has sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook
to fund an ambitious biomedical-research project, called the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative, with a goal of
curing all disease within a generation.

A less publicized initiative related to the $5 billion program
includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that
essentially translate thoughts into commands. One recent project
is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate, and
disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time.

In a paper published in the highly cited scientific journal
Nature on New Year's Eve, researchers detail a wireless brain
device implanted in a primate that records, stimulates, and
modifies its brain activity in real time, sensing a normal
movement and stopping it immediately. One of those researchers is
an investigator with the
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit medical research group
funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Scientists refer to the interference as "therapy" because it is
designed to be used to treat diseases like epilepsy or
Parkinson's by stopping a seizure or other disruptive motion as
it starts.

"Our device is able to monitor the brain while it's providing the
therapy, so you know exactly what's happening," Rikky
Muller, a coauthor of the new study, told Business Insider. A
professor of computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley,
Muller is also a CZ Biohub investigator.

The applications of brain-machine interfaces are far-reaching:
While some researchers focus on using them to
help assist people with spinal-cord injuries or other
illnesses that affect movement, others aim to see them transform
how everyone interacts with laptops and smartphones. Both a
division at Facebook, formerly called Building 8, as well as an
Elon Musk-founded company, called Neuralink, have said they are
working on the latter.

A brain device that changes behavior automatically

In Muller's paper, she and a team
of researchers from Berkeley and a medical-device startup called
Cortera detailed how they
used a device they label the "Wand" to stop a monkey from doing a
trained behavior. In this case, the behavior involved moving a
cursor to a target on a screen using a joystick and holding the
target there for a set period of time.

Placed on top of the monkey's head, the wireless, palm-sized Wand device connected directly to its brain and could record, stimulate, and modify its behavior in real time.Nature Biomedical Engineering

Placed
on top of the monkey's head, the wireless, palm-sized Wand device
connected directly to its brain. From there, it was able to
record, stimulate, and modify the monkey's behavior in real time.

The Wand could "sense" when the primate was about to move the
joystick and stop that movement with a targeted electric signal
sent to the right part of its brain, Muller said. And since the
machine was wireless, the monkey didn't need to be physically
confined or attached to anything for it to work.

"This device is game-changing in the sense that you could have a
subject that's completely free-moving and it would autonomously,
or automatically, know" when and how to disrupt its movement,
said Muller.

'We want people to do the thing that's crazy, the thing that
other people wouldn't try'

The Wand could one day have applications for a range of ailments
that affect movement (also called motor skills), including
spinal-cord injuries and epilepsy.

"Right now we can take a specific motor function, sense that it's
happening, and disrupt it," said Muller.

That's a big departure from current devices, which typically
require multiple pieces of bulky equipment and can only sense
movement or disrupt it at one time. Muller's device does both at
once. To do so, it uses 128 electrodes, or conductors, placed
directly into the primate's brain - roughly 31 times more
electrodes than today's human-grade brain-computer devices, which
are limited to 4-8 electrodes.

"I believe this device opens up possibilities for new types of
treatments," said Muller.

Muller is also the cofounder and chair of the board of Cortera,
which has received grant funding from The Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National
Institutes of Health. Her work on brain-machine interfaces is
just one component of a broader set of projects under the CZ
Biohub umbrella.

Joe DeRisi,
the copresident of the Biohub and a professor of biophysics at
UCSF, told Business Insider that the initiative aims to help
bolster the research projects being done by local scientists, to
build important medical devices that wouldn't otherwise exist,
and to "push boundaries."

"We want people to do the thing that's crazy, the thing that
other people wouldn't try," DeRisi said.